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The Totally Bonkers World of the Ig Nobel Prizes
This week marks the start of the 2026 Nobel Prize announcements for medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace. Inspired by all that rather serious prize-giving, I thought I would turn to a slightly less solemn set of awards — the Ig Nobel awards. Those took place on Sep 3rd.
The what?
For those familiar with the Ig Nobels you can happily skip the next bit. However some may be wondering what the Ig Nobels are, so let’s do that first and ensure we are all on the same page here before we get into who won this year and also why.
The Ig Nobel Prizes: When Serious Science Gets Slightly Silly
What exactly are the Ig Nobel Prizes?
These occupy that important scientific territory somewhere between “Eureka!”and “You spent three years researching WHAT?”
The Ig Nobels celebrate genuine achievements that are so wonderfully peculiar that they “make people laugh, then think.” That distinction matters. These aren’t simply prizes for bad science, stupid ideas or researchers who accidentally set fire to the laboratory fridge. The best Ig Nobel winners have carried out perfectly legitimate research. It’s just that the question being investigated may initially sound as though it was dreamed up after…
